Dust (2005) Pyl

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Dust (2005) Pyl

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This sci-fi take on present-day Russia was made on a shoe-string budget by a group of video and performance artists SVOI 2000, known for their situationist antics. After its release, it didn't take long to send ripples of enthusiastic talk throughout the Russian alternative scene. The cast consists almost entirely of little-known but talented and well-placed actors, the big exception being Pyotr Mamonov, lead singer of the legendary band Zvuki Mu and one of the major Russian counter-culture icons of the past two decades, who brilliantly plays a sullen and mysterious professor involved in secret scientific research conducted by the FSB (post-Soviet KGB).

The main character (the term "protagonist" doesn't quite fit), Alyosha, a toy-factory worker who lives under the supervision of his grandmother, is recruited as a subject in the research, and this brief experience sends his dreary, sedate life into turmoil. A chase ensues as Alyosha finds himself wandering around Moscow in pursuit of a fleeting glimpse of something that he is unable and unwilling to let go, while the FSB staff, annoyed at this unforeseen complication, chase him.

This trippy, dark, existential, confrontational and quintessentially Russian gem combines hilarious and mind-cringing characters and situations with surrealist dream and hallucinatory sequences, and is thickly layered with cultural and social references of varying depth and subtlety. It is greatly enhanced by a masterful score of experimental electronic music.

A must for anybody interested in the contemporary Russian underground cinema.

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Dust (2005) Pyl

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